How did My Hero Academia begin?

The series has a documented birthday before its birthday. In 2008, Akamaru Jump published Horikoshi’s one-shot My Hero: a story about a frail salaryman in a world of heroes. The first version of the character who would become All Might is already in it, and years later its title would be borrowed for volume 9 of the series it became.

In 2012, after Barrage was cancelled, Horikoshi was depressed and dry of ideas, and did something authors rarely get to do: he asked to try the old one-shot again, expanded into a school story with a boy who had no power at all. His first editor, Hitoshi Koike, championed it through a slow start; the first three chapters took longer than most debuts, because the world was being engineered to run. It launched on 7 July 2014. A second editor, Kengo Monji, later took the desk, and postscripts in the volumes preserve Horikoshi’s running commentary on the grind of those years.